The system, due to go commercial in January 2009, will feature an IMS Core linking the femto gateways.

NEC and Ubiquisys (Swindon, England) are long term partners in the emerging and much touted femtocells business, with its ZoneGate technology used in NEC's systems.

"The Japanese market has always led the world in mobile technology so it comes as little surprise that SoftBank is the first operator to deploy 3G femtocells," commented Chris Gilbert, CEO of Ubiquisys.

By quite literally turning their mobile network inside out, they (SoftBank) are in the process creating a mobile broadband network with vastly more capacity and coverage than anything seen before."

U.S. operator Sprint claims to be the first and only (to date) operator to introduce femtocells to its customers, they are only for voice services. The service by SoftBank — Japan's third largest operator after NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, and the company that acquired Vodafone's Japanese operations — will mark the first time 3G units have been deployed in the wild.

A femtocell is a small device that plugs into a domestic broadband connection and gives perfect mobile phone coverage throughout a home or office, cheaper higher quality phone calls, faster mobile broadband and brand new services - all using existing 3G mobile handsets.

The femtocell system being supplied to SoftBank by NEC uses an IMS configured with an SIP server to independently control communications from femtocells.

The system distributes transmission load across the entire mobile network, regardless of the traffic load, and helps prevent congestion as femtocells spread and traffic increases.

The IMS framework is also compatible with backbone networks migrating to IP-based networks, and therefore facilitates the construction of all-IP networks for broadband, fixed and mobile communications.

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< ahref="http://eetimes.eu/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209100666"> Femtocells take broadband route to provisioning